Our Focus

Our faculty and students conduct research on population-level disease prevention, health promotion, health policy, and more. We have a tradition of excellence in research and the application of that knowledge through public health practice and service. Our experienced faculty share their research with community leaders, policymakers, and fellow researchers to better inform the public, respond to emergencies, and provide counsel on emerging health issues facing communities.

Our research- and practice-focused centers specialize in a wide range of important public health topics—including diabetes epidemiology, cancer prevention, and statistical consulting—and are nationally, if not internationally, recognized for their work. Our Center for Global Health is the only World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Promoting Family and Child Health in the Americas. We’re also home to nationally-funded research centers including the Colorado Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence, one of six centers of its kind funded by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC); Rocky Mountain Public Health Training Center, one of 10 centers funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration Agency; and the Center for Health, Work & Environment (one of 10 centers of its kind funded by the CDC).  

Contact Information 

If you need specific guidance on your research, contact your department chair or Associate Dean for Research, Dana Dabelea:

• Department of Biostatistics & Informatics: David Conti
• Department of Community & Behavioral Health: Jenn Leiferman
• Department of Environmental & Occupational Health: Beth Carlton
• Department of Epidemiology: Jill Norris
• Department of Health Systems, Management & Policy: Glen Mays

Our Team 

Better Together? Learning to Align Medical, Social, and Public Health Systems to Promote Health Equity

Glen P Mays, Isabel Cuervo, Alonzo L Plough

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Handling of Multicohort Data in Pooled Analysis of Environmental Exposures: Confounding by Cohort of the Relationship Between Perfluoroalkyl Substances and Birthweight in the ECHO Program

Public Health Impact Statement: Multi-cohort consortia like the Environmental influences on Childhood Health Outcomes (ECHO) program allow for combined data analysis, overcoming power and generalizability limitations of smaller individual studies, though this may come at a cost of bias like cohort-level confounding. Our study shows that failure to account for this type of confounding led to bias in the relationship between prenatal PFAS exposure and birthweight with direct implications for accurate risk assessment. Various commonly used approaches to deal with this bias proved adequate in this example, though we highlight that some choice approaches may be more beneficial than others in different scenarios.

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BioNeuralNet: A Graph Neural Network Based Multi-Omics Network Data Analysis Tool

Public Health Impact Statement: Many chronic diseases result from interactions among genes, proteins, metabolites, and environmental factors. BioNeuralNet is a new method that provides a framework for integrating these diverse ("multi-omics") datasets into biologically meaningful networks that can reveal disease mechanisms that traditional approaches may miss. The software uses machine learning methods to learn patterns from complex biological networks, producing low-dimensional representations that can be used for prediction, classification, and biomarker discovery. The resulting biomarkers can be used for precision public health to identify individuals at highest risk for disease and biological subtypes that respond differently to interventions.

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Faculty Highlight of the Month